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When the phone rang so early, I knew that something was wrong. The salute sobs signed the contract of knowing. I listened with motherly instincts to the sobbing intonations, the breathing and the corrupted attempts at forced air. It was my foster daughter. Although now out of the care of the state and living independently, she was still bound under the wire of my chicken hatch. Like all good chooks, she came home to roost when she needed help, advice or love.

"Breath darling," I tutored like a laboring husband.

"What has happened?" slipped straight from my mind and down over the rollercoaster of my tongue. The gradient of the coaster ride swooshed the words upward when they hit end of slide and the noise produced sounded like a high-pitched wind gale.

"Aunty," she sob whispered, her words coarse, forced and bile bitter. "Aunty passed away early this morning."

Forgetting my role as her pillar of strength, my hand crept up to my heart in an attempt to claw away the shooting pain. Without a moments thought to her immense needs I babbled my own incoherent cognitions.

"No. She can't be. What happened? No, it must be a mistake. How do you know this? Oh my God. What happened?"

Aunty, the main stay of my foster children's family, the only family member who had adorned my foster kids with love and care, the only person who ever enquired after them and the keeper of family information had died.

Aunty had been unwell for many years. She had a pseudo brain tumor that affected her pituitary gland. She was obese, epileptic and larger than life itself in her wisdom, understanding and empathic appreciation of what kids needed. I often wondered if her fits were a metaphor for the inner laughing that she so yearned to have, instead of the memory of terror tattooed on her heart from her formative years. Unable to innately produce fits of joyous laughter her body forced her into fits of seizures. To see them was no laughing matter. However, to share the stories with her afterwards continually bought the family ring of story telling to life. Our teasing of her, the elaborations of her shaking and the denial of our fears smoldered away in the campfire of our minds like coals that nobody wanted to step on. None of us was ready to accept that she would one day die from the very behaviors we joked about.

Aunty often had fits while she was in the bath. The kids would know she had gone under because the bath water would rage like the Victoria Falls over the rocks of the bathroom doorframe and

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